Jihad 1

he following article
is based on reporting by Craig Pyes, Judith Miller and
Stephen Engelberg and was written by Mr. Engelberg.

In 1987, several years after he began training Arab
volunteers to oust Soviet forces from Afghanistan, Osama bin
Laden had a vision. The time had come, he told friends, to start
a global jihad, or Islamic holy war, against the corrupt secular
governments of the Muslim Middle East and the Western powers
that supported them.

Mr. bin Laden, the Saudi millionaire, would use his camps in
Afghanistan to take holy warriors from around the world  who
had always pursued local goals  and shape them into an
international network that would fight to bring all Muslims
under a militant version of Islamic law.

Some of his comrades in arms warned him that the goal was
unattainable.

"I talked to Osama one day and asked him what was he doing,"
recalled Abdullah Anas, an Algerian who was fighting in
Afghanistan at the time and provided a rare personal narrative
of the formation of Mr. bin Laden's organization. " ĀImagine
after five years a guy from Malaysia goes back to his country.
How can he remember you are his leader? He will get married,
have children, engage in work in his country. How can you
establish one camp for jihad in the world?' "

But he and other doubters watched as Mr. bin Laden, who is
now America's most wanted terror suspect, set about doing just
that. Mr. Anas's account and those of other witnesses, along
with intelligence from United States, the Middle East and
Europe, draw a vivid and newly detailed portrait of the birth of
a modern jihad movement. What began as a holy war against the
Soviet Union took on a new dimension, Mr. Anas said, when Mr.
bin Laden broke away and established a new corps of militant
Muslims whose ambitions reached far beyond the borders of
Afghanistan.

From his Afghan camps, Mr. bin Laden created a kind of
clearinghouse for Islamic terrorism, which American officials
say not only conducts its own operations but trains and
underwrites local militants, connecting home-grown plots to a
global crusade.

His strategy is aptly captured by one of his many code names:
The Contractor. The group he founded 13 years ago, Al Qaeda,
Arabic for The Base, is led by masterful opportunists who tailor
their roles to the moment, sometimes teaching the fine points of
explosives, sometimes sending in their own operatives, sometimes
simply supplying inspiration.

The group has become a beacon for Muslim Malaysians,
Algerians, Filipinos, Palestinians, Egyptians, even Americans
who have come to view the United States as their enemy, an
imperial power propping up corrupt and godless governments. Mr.
bin Laden has tried to bridge divisions in a movement long
plagued by doctrinal, ethnic and geographic differences. "Local
politics drives what they're doing, but it's much more
visionary," said Robert Blitzer, a former F.B.I.
counterterrorism official. "This is worldwide. This is, ĀWe want
to be somewhere in a hundred years.' "

According to a recent Central Intelligence Agency analysis,
Al Qaeda operates about a dozen Afghan camps that have trained
as many as 5,000 militants, who in turn have created cells in 50
countries. Intelligence officials say the group is experimenting
with chemical weapons, including nerve gas, at one of its
camps.

Mr. bin Laden and his supporters use centuries-old
interpretations of the Koran to justify violence in the name of
God against fellow Muslims or bystanders  a vision on the
farthest extremes of one of the world's largest religions. But
their operations are thoroughly modern  encrypted e-mail,
bomb-making recipes stored on CD-ROM's, cell phones and
satellite communications.

The group plans attacks months or years in advance,
investigators say. A former United States Army sergeant, Ali A.
Mohamed  who worked for Mr. bin Laden and is now a government
witness  has told prosecutors that Al Qaeda trains "sleeper"
agents, or "submarines," to live undetected among local
populations.

Mr. bin Laden has not achieved his more ambitious goals. He
has not brought more Muslims under the rule of Islamic law,
toppled any of the Arab governments he took aim at, or driven
the United States out of the Middle East. His violence has
repulsed many believers and prompted severe crackdowns in Arab
states that already have limited political freedoms.

Nonetheless, he and his small inner circle have preoccupied
American officials, paralyzing embassies, thwarting military
exercises and making Americans abroad feel anxious and
vulnerable. Earlier this month, the United States closed its
Rome embassy for nearly two days after intelligence officials
warned of a possible attack.

American officials have charged Mr. bin Laden with
masterminding the 1998 bombings of two embassies in Africa that
killed more than 200 people, and suspect him of involvement in
the October bombing of the destroyer Cole in Yemen, which killed
17 sailors. Four men went on trial this month in lower Manhattan
in the African bombings.

American authorities are also examining Al Qaeda's role in
three plots timed to millennium celebrations in 1999  attacks
directed at another American ship, a so-far unknown target in
the United States, and tourist sites and a hotel in Jordan.

Mr. bin Laden's group has recently attempted operations
against Israel  a significant departure, American and Middle
Eastern officials say. They acknowledge that he has ensured his
organization's survival, in the event of his capture or death,
by designating a successor: his longtime aide, Abdulaziz abu
Sitta, an Egyptian known as Muhammad Atef or Abu Hoffs al-Masri.
Last week, according to Al Jazeera, an Arab satellite channel,
his son married Mr. Masri's daughter in Kandahar,
Afghanistan.

"His arrest, which we dearly hope for, is only one step along
the road of the many things we need to do to eliminate the
network of organizations," said Richard A. Clarke, the top White
House counterterrorism official.

The Cause:

Afghan War Draws Young Arab Fighters

Al Qaeda grew out of the jihad inspired by Muslim
scholars to combat the Soviet Union's 1979 invasion of
Afghanistan. They issued religious rulings, known as fatwas,
which exhorted Muslims everywhere to defend the Islamic land of
Afghanistan from infidels. Over the next few years, several
thousand young Arab men joined the Afghan resistance.

One of the first to answer the call was a young Algerian
named Boujema Bounouar, who went by the nom de guerre Abdullah
Anas. In recent interviews in London, where he now lives, Mr.
Anas recounted how Mr. bin Laden went to Afghanistan to fight
the Soviets and was drawn to a group of Egyptians who wanted to
start a global jihad.

Mr. Anas, who is now a leader of an Algerian Islamic
political party, is not a dispassionate observer. He
acknowledges that he opposed Mr. bin Laden, whose program of
terrorism, he says, has tarred the reputations of thousands of
Arabs who fought honorably for the Afghan cause. But his
firsthand account, which conforms with Western intelligence
analysis, provides one of few portraits of Mr. bin Laden's
evolution as a militant leader.

The two men were defined by many of the same forces. Mr. Anas
said his journey from teacher of the Koran to holy warrior began
in 1984, when he was 25 and living with his family in Western
Algeria. Visiting the local library, he read in a news weekly
about a religious ruling that waging war against the Soviets was
every Muslim's duty.

"After a few days, everyone heard about this fatwa and
started talking," he recalled. " ĀWhere is this Afghanistan?
Which people are they? How can we go there? How much is the
ticket?' "

That year, Mr. Anas was among the million Muslims who
participated in the hajj, the annual pilgrimage to Mecca, Saudi
Arabia. "You feel very holy," he said. "People from all over the
world. From Zimbabwe to New Delhi. Everyone is wearing just two
pieces of white cotton. Everybody. You can't describe who is the
minister, who is the president. No jewelry. No good suit."

In Mecca, he said, prayer leaders spoke emotionally about the
jihad in Afghanistan.

He was standing in the marble expanse of the Great Mosque
with 50,000 others when, he said, a friend pointed out a radical
Palestinian scholar who was organizing the Arab support for the
Afghans. His name was Abdullah Azzam, and his writings, which
would help spur the revival of the jihad movement in the 20th
century, were just becoming widely known.

Mr. Anas introduced himself and asked whether the magazine
article he had seen in the library was correct. Had the
religious leaders agreed that fighting in Afghanistan was a duty
of all Muslims?

"He said, ĀYes, it's true.' "

" ĀO.K.,' I said. ĀIf I want to go to Afghanistan, what do I
do now?' "

Mr. Azzam gave him a business card with a telephone number in
Islamabad, Pakistan, where he was a university professor. A week
later, Mr. Anas was on a flight from Saudi Arabia to Pakistan.

He had no idea where he was going, or what he would do. He
dialed the only phone number he knew in Pakistan, reaching Mr.
Azzam, who offered him a place to stay in his own house, a
bustling salon frequented by students and scholars.

It was there that he first caught sight of Mr. Azzam's
youngest daughter, whom he would marry five years later. And Mr.
Azzam introduced him to a Saudi visitor identified in the
traditional Arabic way, as Abu Abdullah, the father of his
eldest son, Abdullah. The visitor was Osama bin Laden.

The two men exchanged pleasantries. Mr. bin Laden's name was
well known. He was said to be the youngest of 24 brothers in a
family that ran one of the largest construction companies in the
Arab world.

Mr. bin Laden seemed no different from the other Arab
volunteers who were starting to arrive in Pakistan, Mr. Anas
recalled. The conversation turned to how the volunteers could
help the Afghans win their jihad, and teach them more about
Islam.

The Soviet forces had a considerable advantage in the Afghan
conflict. Their helicopter gunships controlled the air, and
their troops held the main roads. But the rebels had powerful
friends. The United States and Saudi Arabia were spending
millions funneling arms to the Afghans through Pakistan's
intelligence service.

Mr. Anas began by teaching the Koran to the Afghan rebels,
who did not speak Arabic and learned the verses by rote. He also
led prayers at a "guest house" set up in Pakistan for Arab
volunteers. At the time, he said, there were no more than a few
dozen Arabs in the country, working with the rebels. None spoke
the Afghan languages.

After a few months, Mr. Anas said, he trekked into
Afghanistan to join a combat unit, one of three Arabs traveling
with a caravan of 600 Afghan soldiers. He learned Farsi and took
on the role of mediator, traveling among the feuding rebel
camps. He spent most of each year inside Afghanistan.

Mr. Anas became a top aide to Commander Ahmed Shah Massoud,
whose troops controlled northern Afghanistan and are now
fighting the Taliban rulers  who support Mr. bin Laden.

Like many Muslims who joined the rebels, Mr. Anas expected to
die in the Afghan jihad and earn the special status designated
in the Koran for martyrs, which includes forgiveness of sins and
the enjoyment in Paradise of beautiful virgins. "It's not the
main idea to be a shahid," or martyr, he said. "But it's part of
my plan."

In the mid-1980's, American and Middle Eastern intelligence
officials say, Mr. bin Laden moved to Peshawar, a Pakistani city
near the border with Afghanistan. The city was a staging ground
for the war against the Soviets; American, French and Pakistani
intelligence officers intrigued and competed there to manipulate
the Afghan cause to their countries' advantage.

Mr. bin Laden's fortune of several hundred million dollars
gained him immediate popularity.

"He was one of the guys who came to jihad in Afghanistan,"
Mr. Anas said. "But unlike the others, what he had was a lot of
money. He's not very sophisticated politically or
organizationally. But he's an activist with great imagination.
He ate very little. He slept very little. Very generous. He'd
give you his clothes. He'd give you his money."

Mr. Anas, who returned annually to Pakistan from the Afghan
battlefields to visit with Mr. Azzam, said Mr. bin Laden at
first slept in the guest house in Peshawar on a cushion on the
floor. He recalled that Mr. Azzam liked to say: "You see, this
man has everything in his country. You see he lives with all the
poor people in this room."

At about this time, in 1984, Mr. Azzam set up the
organization that would play a pivotal role in the global jihad
over the next decade. It was called the Makhtab al Khadimat, the
Office of Services, and its goal was to recruit and train Muslim
volunteers for the Afghan fronts. Mr. Azzam raised money for the
organization in countries overseas including the United States
and gave impassioned speeches promoting the Afghan cause. Mr.
bin Laden embraced the idea from its inception and became Mr.
Azzam's partner, providing financial support and handling
military affairs.

Mr. bin Laden worked best with small groups, Mr. Anas said.
"When you sit with Osama, you don't want to leave the meeting,"
he said. "You wish to continue talking to him because he is very
calm, very fluent."

A main goal of the Office of Services, Mr. Anas said, was to
prevent the increasing number of outside volunteers from taking
sides in the rebels' factional struggles. "We are in Afghanistan
to help the jihad and all the Afghan people," Mr. Azzam told
him.

But there was increasing frustration from many of the
disaffected young Muslims over Mr. Azzam's insistence that the
Office of Services support only the Afghan cause  when many
were agitated about the plight of their own homelands. Some
approached Mr. bin Laden.

"These people are always saying to Osama: ĀYou should
establish something. Have a clear idea to use these people after
Afghanistan for other wars.' "

Among those most ardently courting Mr. bin Laden was a group
of Egyptian radicals called the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, which
helped assassinate President Anwar el-Sadat in 1981.

The Egyptian group advocated the overthrow of governments by
terrorism and violence, and one of its key figures, Ayman al-
Zawahiri, had taken shelter in Afghanistan. Mr. Anas said  and
Western intelligence agencies agree  that Dr. Zawahiri was a
commanding early influence on Mr. bin Laden. Today he is part of
Al Qaeda's leadership, according to intelligence officials.

But Mr. Azzam quarreled bitterly with the Egyptians.

Mr. Anas said he once witnessed a heated argument between Mr.
Azzam and Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, a radical religious scholar,
who argued that the flouting of Islamic law had turned
Presidents Mohammed Zia ul-Haq of Pakistan and Hosni Mubarak of
Egypt into infidels who could therefore be killed. Sheik Abdel
Rahman later moved to Brooklyn, where he was associated with an
Office of Services branch. In 1995 he was convicted of plotting
to blow up New York landmarks.

In 1986, according to Mr. Anas and Middle Eastern
intelligence officials, Mr. bin Laden began to chart a separate
course. He established his own training camp for Persian Gulf
Arabs, a group of about 50 who lived in tents set apart from the
other Afghan fighters. He called the camp Al Masadah  The
Lion's Den.

Within little more than a year the movement divided, as Mr.
bin Laden and the Egyptians founded Al Qaeda  the "base" for
what they hoped would be a global crusade.

Mr. Anas said Mr. Azzam confided to him that Egyptian
ideologues had wooed Mr. bin Laden away, gaining access to his
money. "He told me one time: ĀI'm very upset about Osama. This
heaven-sent man, like an angel. I am worried about his future if
he stays with these people.' "

The differences between Mr. Azzam and Mr. bin Laden were
largely tactical, Mr. Anas said, noting that the two men
remained friends.

A committed enemy of Israel, Mr. Azzam believed the Arab
warriors should focus on creating an Islamic state in
Afghanistan, a process that could take decades. Mr. bin Laden,
according to Mr. Anas, came to believe that such a war could be
fought in many countries simultaneously.

"The arguments were very secret," Mr. Anas said. "Only three
to four people knew about them at the time." Mr. Azzam saw
little difference between the United States and the Soviet
Union, contending in his articles and speeches that both were
hostile to Islam. But Mr. Azzam opposed terrorism against the
West, Mr. Anas said.

By the late 1980's, Peshawar had become a magnet for
disaffected young Muslims who shared Mr. bin Laden's views. "Ten
people would open a guest house and start issuing fatwas," Mr.
Anas recalled. " ĀWe are going to make revolution in Jordan, in
Egypt, in Syria.' And they haven't got any contact with the real
jihad in Afghanistan."

The tide of the Afghan war was turning. Stinger missiles,
provided through the American covert program, had forced Soviet
aircraft to fly far above the battlefields. Afghanistan had
become Moscow's Vietnam. By February 1989, the Soviets had
withdrawn.

A C.I.A. official said that the agency, aware of the changing
nature of the jihad, had taken some steps he would not specify
to counter the threat. But Milt Bearden, the former C.I.A.
station chief in Islamabad, who coordinated the agency's
anti-Soviet effort in Afghanistan, disagreed.

"The Soviet Union, armed to the teeth, was falling apart," he
said. "A shooting war then erupted in the Persian Gulf.
Afghanistan was off the front burner."

When the war ended, he said, "we got the hell out of
there."

The Afghan rebels' war continued, first against the
Soviet-backed government and then within their own ranks. On
Nov. 24, 1989, Mr. Azzam and two sons were killed by a car bomb
in Peshawar as they drove to Friday Prayers. The murders were
never solved.

Mr. Anas said he tried to take over leadership of the Office
of Services. According to the C.I.A., the group split; the
extremist faction took control, siding with Mr. bin Laden.

"They loved the ideas of Osama and the person of Abdullah
Azzam," Mr. Anas said wistfully. "They don't love me."

The Base:

From Many Lands, Under One
Banner

Fired by their triumph over the Soviets, the
Arabs who had fought in Afghanistan returned home, eager to
apply the principles of jihad to their native lands.

The Koran sets strict limits on when and how holy war is to
be undertaken. But Gilles Kepel, a leading French scholar of
contemporary Islam, said the Afghan veterans were guided by
their own radical interpretation of sacred Muslim texts.
"Intoxicated by the Muslim victory in Afghanistan," he said,
"they believed that it could be replicated elsewhere  that the
whole world was ripe for jihad, which is contrary to Islamic
tradition."

They called themselves the Arab Afghans.

In Jordan some founded a group, Jaish Muhammad, that
officials say took aim at King Hussein, whose family claims
descent from the Prophet Muhammad.

In Algeria, the Arab Afghans were among the founders of the
Armed Islamic Group, the most radical to emerge after the
military government canceled the 1991 elections. Known by its
French initials, G.I.A, it began by blowing up military targets
and escalated to wholesale massacres of Algerians who did not
believe in the jihad.

According to Mr. Anas, one of its founding members was an
Algerian who had initially fought with him in Afghanistan but
joined Al Qaeda in the late 1980's. Mr. Anas says he has been
told that Mr. bin Laden provided some of the seed money for the
G.I.A.

The early 1990's proved difficult for Mr. bin Laden. He was
enraged by King Fahd's decision to let American troops wage the
Persian Gulf war from Saudi Arabia, site of the two holiest
shrines in Islam. He began to focus his wrath on the United
States and the Saudi government. After the conflict ended, he
moved to Afghanistan.

But his stay was brief. Within months he fled, telling
associates that Saudi Arabia had hired the Pakistani
intelligence service to kill him. There is no confirmation that
such a plot existed. Nonetheless, in 1991, Mr. bin Laden moved
to Sudan, where a militantly Islamic government had taken
power.

Over the next five years, Mr. bin Laden built a group that
combined legitimate business with support for world holy
war.

He also set out to accomplish his overriding goal of
gathering the leading Islamic extremist groups under one banner.
According to Middle Eastern officials, Mr. bin Laden and his
envoys met with radicals from Pakistan and Egypt to propose an
international Islamic front, led by Afghan veterans, that would
fight Americans and Jews.

Al Qaeda began training its own operatives. Ali Mohamed, the
government witness, who has said he arranged Mr. bin Laden's
move to Sudan, told investigators that he taught group members
about weapons, explosives, kidnapping, urban fighting,
counterintelligence and other tactics at camps in Afghanistan
and Sudan. He said he showed some of the trainees how to set up
cells "that could be used in operations."

The dispatch of American troops to Somalia in late 1992 and
1993 as part of a United Nations mission was another affront to
Mr. bin Laden. The Bush administration presented it as a relief
operation.

American officials say a defector from Al Qaeda told them it
viewed the deployment as a dangerous expansion of American
influence in the region and a step toward undermining the
Islamic government of Sudan.

Al Qaeda privately issued fatwas that directed members to
attack American soldiers in Saudi Arabia, Yemen and the Horn of
Africa, according to American prosecutors. They said he also
sent his military chief, an Egyptian who had been with him at
the formation of Al Qaeda, to find the vulnerabilities of United
Nations forces in Africa.

Al Qaeda created a cell in Kenya as a "gateway" to its
operations in Somalia, the prosecutors assert. Members of the
group blended into Kenyan society, opening legitimate businesses
that sold fish and dealt in diamonds, and operating an Islamic
charity.

Federal prosecutors say at least five group members crossed
the border to Somalia, where they trained some of the fighters
involved in an Oct. 3, 1993, battle with United States special
forces that left 18 Americans and several hundred Somalis
dead.

The battle, one of the most widely publicized setbacks for
American forces in recent memory, cast a shadow over every
subsequent Clinton administration debate on the possible uses of
ground troops. American intelligence did not learn of Al Qaeda's
role in the ambush until several years later.

Prosecutors say the group also considered attacking Americans
in Kenya to retaliate for the Somalia mission. Mr. Mohamed
testified that Mr. bin Laden sent him to Nairobi in late 1993 to
look over possible American, French, British and Israeli targets
for a bomb attack, including the American Embassy. He said he
took photos, drew diagrams and wrote a report, which he
delivered to his boss in Khartoum. "Bin Laden looked at the
picture of the American Embassy and pointed to where a truck
could go as a suicide bomber," he said.

American prosecutors say Al Qaeda had more grandiose plans: a
leading member, an Iraqi who Mr. Anas said had first gravitated
to Mr. bin Laden in Afghanistan, tried to buy enriched uranium
in Europe.

The Iraqi, Mahdouh Mahmud Salim, forged links between Mr. bin
Laden's group and others supported by Iran. Mr. Salim met with
an Iranian religious official in Khartoum, and soon afterward,
the prosecutors say, Al Qaeda members got training from
Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed Shiite group in Lebanon skilled in
making car bombs. American officials said this alliance was
notable because it marked the first time radicals from the
minority Shiite branch of Islam collaborated with extremists
from the dominant Sunni branch.

Mr. bin Laden's business ventures in Sudan  including a
tannery, a transportation company and a construction concern 
raised money and served as cover for the travels of Mr. Salim
and others, according to American officials. They said that his
companies cornered Sudan's exports of gum, sunflower and sesame
products  and that he invested $50 million of his family money
in a new Islamic bank in Khartoum.

The Network:

As in Afghanistan, So in the
World

The new jihad movement was fueled by the civil
war that consumed Afghanistan in the early 1990's. The training
camps that had once schooled soldiers to battle the Soviet enemy
now attracted militants more interested in fomenting holy war
back home  in America, Europe or the Middle East  than in the
struggle for control of Afghanistan.

The Office of Services, the Pakistan-based group founded in
the 1980's by Mr. Azzam to recruit soldiers for the anti-Soviet
cause, arranged the travels of some of these new jihadists,
according to European and American officials.

Many of those associated with the office, Mr. Anas said,
shared Mr. bin Laden's vision of a global movement. American
officials suspect they were acting under his instructions,
though this remains a subject of debate among intelligence
analysts.

American investigators stumbled across the first signs of the
new global phenomenon in 1993, when they began to examine the
bombing at the World Trade Center.

They discovered that the four men who carried out the attack,
which killed 6 and wounded more than 1,000, had ties to Sheik
Omar Abdel Rahman, whom they charged with leading a worldwide
"jihad organization" that had begun plotting to kill Americans
as early as 1989.

Mr. Abdel Rahman was later convicted of conspiring to blow up
New York landmarks, including the United Nations. But in the
years since, American intelligence officials have come to
believe that he and the World Trade Center bombers had ties to
Al Qaeda.

The evidence is suggestive, but not conclusive. Several of
those convicted in the World Trade Center case were associated
with the Brooklyn refugee center that was a branch of the Office
of Services, the Pakistan-based organization that Mr. bin Laden
helped finance and lead. The Brooklyn center was headed for a
time by Mustafa Shalabi, an Egyptian murdered in 1991 in a case
that remains unsolved. Federal prosecutors recently disclosed
that it was Mr. Shalabi whom Mr. bin Laden called in 1991 when
he needed help moving to Sudan, according to Mr. Mohamed, the
federal witness.

One of the men convicted of bombing the World Trade Center,
Ahmad M. Ajaj, spent four months in Pakistan in 1992, returning
to the United States with a bomb manual later seized by the
United States government. An English translation of the
document, entered into evidence in the World Trade Center trial,
said that the manual was dated 1982, that it had been published
in Amman, Jordan, and that it carried a heading on the front and
succeeding pages: The Basic Rule.

Those appear to be errors. Two separate translations of the
document, one done at the request of The New York Times, show
that the heading said Al Qaeda  which translates as The Base,
the name of Mr. bin Laden's group. In addition, the document
lists a publication date of 1989, a year after Mr. bin Laden
founded his organization. And the place of publication is
Afghanistan, not Jordan.

Steven Emerson, a terrorism expert who first pointed out the
errors, said they deprived investigators of a subtle early clue
to the existence of Mr. bin Laden's group.

While the trade center trial ended in 1994, federal
prosecutors did not open their grand jury investigation of Mr.
bin Laden and Al Qaeda until 1996.

"Had the government correctly translated the material," Mr.
Emerson said, "it might have understood that the men who blew up
the World Trade Center and Mr. bin Laden's group were
linked."

Asked about the mistranslation, an official in the United
States Attorney's office, who declined to be identified, said
only that Mr. Ajaj had been carrying "voluminous material
printed by various organizations." He added that their titles
referred to international conspiracy, commando operations and
engineering of explosives.

The jihad movement also took root in Europe. In August 1994,
three young French Muslims of North African descent, wearing
hoods and brandishing machine pistols, opened fire on tourists
in a hotel lobby in Marrakesh, Morocco, killing two Spaniards
and wounding a third. The French police investigating the attack
learned that it had been planned by two Moroccan veterans of the
Afghan war, who had recruited commandos for the attack in Paris
and Orl´ans and sent more than a dozen of them to Afghanistan
for training.

The indoctrination of the young Muslims began with religion,
according to French court papers and testimony. An Orl´ans
mathematics professor and interpreter of the Koran, Mohamed
Zin´dine, gathered around him a group of men from the slums of
Orl´ans who wanted to learn how to pray. Later, French court
papers say, he instructed them in the concept of waging jihad
against corrupt governments, saying it was a higher stage of
Islamic observance.

One young Moroccan testified that Mr. Zin´dine  who is now a
fugitive  showed him a videotape of Muslim victims of "torture
in Bosnia, of babies with their throats cut, of pregnant women
disemboweled, and fingernails torn off." The young man added,
"He told me there was a way of helping them and that I must help
them." Prayers for people like the Muslims in Bosnia, he quoted
Mr. Zin´dine as saying, were not enough. He must become an
"armed humanitarian."

European investigators tracing the Afghan network in France,
Belgium and Germany found records of phone calls between local
extremists and the Office of Services in Pakistan. In March
1995, Belgian investigators came across another clue: A CD-ROM
in the car of another Algerian, who had been trained in
Afghanistan in 1992 and was part of the G.I.A. cell in Brussels.
The CD was initially ignored, Belgian officials say.

Months later, the Belgians began translating its contents and
discovered several different versions of a manual for terrorism
that had begun circulating among Islamic militants in the early
1990's. The voluminous manual covered diverse subjects, from
"psychological war in Islam" to "the organizational structure of
Israeli intelligence" to "recruiting according to the American
method."

The manual also offered detailed recipes for making bombs,
including instructions on when to shake the chemicals and how to
use a wristwatch as a detonator. In addition there were
instructions on how to kill with toxins, gases and drugs. The
preface included a dedication to the new hero of the holy war:
Osama bin Laden. Versions of the manual circulated widely and
were seized by the police all over Europe.

Reuel Gerecht, a former C.I.A. official, said he was told
that the agency did not obtain its own copy of the manual before
the end of 1999. "The truth is," he said, "they missed for years
the largest terrorist guide ever written." The omission, he
asserted, reflects the agency's reluctance to scrutinize the
fallout from its support of the anti-Soviet jihad.

A C.I.A. official said that the agency had had "access to
versions" of the manual since the late 1980's. "It's not the
Holy Grail that Gerecht reports it to be," he said, adding that
the terrorist-related parts were fairly recent additions.

By the mid-1990's, American officials had begun to focus on
Mr. bin Laden and his entourage in Sudan. They saw him as the
embodiment of a dangerous new development: a stateless sponsor
of terrorism who was using his personal fortune  which one
Middle Eastern official estimated at $270 million  to bankroll
extremist causes.

American officials pressed Sudan to eject Mr. bin Laden, and
in 1996 they succeeded, forcing him into exile. It was a
diplomatic triumph, but one that many American officials would
come to rue. Mr. bin Laden made his way back to Afghanistan,
where a new group of young Islamic militants, the Taliban, was
taking control.

American and Middle Eastern officials said some of the cash
that the Taliban used to buy off local warlords came from Mr.
bin Laden. Soon the new, hard-line rulers of Afghanistan allowed
him to use their country to pursue his goal of creating "one
jihad camp for the world," as Mr. Anas put it.

The Edict:

A Sacred Muslim Duty to Kill All
Foes

Two years after he arrived in Afghanistan, in
February 1998, Mr. bin Laden publicly announced his intentions.
At a camp in Khost, in eastern Afghanistan, he and several other
leaders of militant groups declared that they had founded the
International Islamic Front for Jihad Against Jews and
Crusaders, an umbrella entity that included Al Qaeda and groups
from Egypt, Pakistan and Bangladesh, among others.

The front issued the following fatwa: "To kill Americans and
their allies, both civil and military, is an individual duty of
every Muslim who is able, in any country where this is
possible."

On Aug. 7, 1998, eight years to the day after the first
American troops set foot in Saudi Arabia, Mr. bin Laden
delivered on the threat, American prosecutors say. Bombs
exploded hours apart at the American Embassies in Kenya and
Tanzania.

The plot, as described by federal prosecutors, was truly
international. Prosecutors assert that the attacks were carried
out by Muslims from Tanzania, Saudi Arabia and Jordan, most of
whom were trained in Afghanistan. The Kenyan plotters, they say,
spoke directly with Mr. bin Laden by satellite telephone as they
developed their plans.

The attacks were costly for Al Qaeda. Less than two weeks
after the embassy bombings, the United States conducted air
strikes against Mr. bin Laden's camps in Afghanistan. Over the
next two years, police and intelligence agencies around the
world, many prodded by the United States, arrested more than 100
militants in some 20 countries.

Almost every month, authorities detain or question people
with ties to Al Qaeda. Late last year, in what American
officials described as one of the more alarming cases, the
Kuwaiti police arrested a local man, an Afghan veteran, who said
he was associated with Mr. bin Laden's group and planning to
bomb American and Kuwaiti targets. American officials say he
ultimately led the police to a weapons cache of almost 300
pounds of explosives and more than 1,400 detonators.

And in addition to the two-day closure of the American
Embassy in Rome, officials say, recent warnings of a possible Al
Qaeda attack prompted the United States to divert an entire
carrier battle group scheduled to dock in Naples.

American officials acknowledge that Al Qaeda and Mr. bin
Laden have proven resourceful, resilient adversaries. Much of
his personal wealth has now been spent, or is in bank accounts
that are now frozen. But officials say he is raising money
through a network of charities and businesses. His group
reconstitutes its networks in many countries as quickly as they
are disrupted.

And failure can breed success. In late 1999, American
officials say, a group of Yemenis botched an attempt to blow up
an American ship, The Sullivans, as it passed through Yemen.
Their boat, loaded with explosives, sank a few feet off shore.

This year, American officials say, a Saudi operative of Mr.
bin Laden's who helped organize that attack worked with some of
the same people on the bombing of the Cole in Yemen.

Internal crackdowns on Muslim militants, like the Algerian
government's largely successful attempts to stamp out the G.I.A.
in the mid- 1990's, have in several instances fueled the
international jihad.

American officials said the most radical Algerians were now
collaborating with Mr. bin Laden. In 1999, Algerians were for
the first time implicated in plots against the United States,
when Ahmed Ressam was arrested crossing the border from Canada
with a carload of explosives. Mr. Ressam goes on trial later
this year in Los Angeles.

American and Middle Eastern officials say Al Qaeda has now
expanded its jihad to include Israel, which until recently had
regarded Mr. bin Laden as an American problem. The officials say
Al Qaeda has financed and trained an anti-Israel group, Asbat al
Ansar, that operates from a Palestinian refugee camp in
Lebanon.

Last June, Israel charged in a sealed indictment that a Hamas
member who was plotting to attack targets within Israel,
including settlers and the army, had been trained in one of Mr.
bin Laden's Afghan camps. "Al Qaeda wants in on the action  the
new intifada against Israel," said one American official.

Olivier Roy, a French scholar who follows Islamic activities,
says Al Qaeda's biggest asset is the thousands of jihadists
around the world who no longer see their struggle in strictly
local or even national terms, which makes them impervious to
normal political or military pressure.

Mr. bin Laden's actions, he said, are "not the continuation
of politics by other means."